The "skin" issue of Stanford Medicine magazine is out and online. In it, I have a Q&A with actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. TV audiences came to know Anna through her work as Nancy McNally, the White House national security advisor on the famed series "The West Wing." And now, after seven seasons, she's ending another acclaimed role, hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus on Showtime's "Nurse Jackie." Bur her seminal work has been in the theater, in two groundbreaking plays early in her career: "Twilight Los Angeles" and "Fires in the Mirror." Her last theatrical piece, "Let Me Down Easy," was a paean to the human body in its strength and fragility.
There are few actors who get into and under the skin of their characters more acutely than Anna. We thought it would be interesting (and different) for this issue of the magazine, which focuses on skin diseases, to talk with Anna and get another sort of take on skin. "In the early part of my career [my skin color] was a big stumbling block," she told me. "There were stereotypes. As a woman, if you didn't fit into the idea of a tragic mulatto or mammy it was really hard to situate yourself."
Read on in the Q&A.
Previously: This summer's Stanford Medicine magazine shows some skin and Let me down easy: A conversation with Anna Deavere Smith
Illustration by Tina Berning
